


"Experiencing Gore, Encountering Bill." Excerpts from the William F. Buckley Jr.-Gore Vidal Sex Letters

by borevidal



Category: Historical RPF, Political RPF - US 20th c.
Genre: Enemies to Lovers, Epistolary, Game Shows, Gossip, Hate Sex, Historical References, M/M, Oral Sex, Period-Typical Homophobia, Phone Sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-14
Updated: 2018-12-19
Packaged: 2019-09-17 03:26:05
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 10,996
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16966791
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/borevidal/pseuds/borevidal
Summary: “I never say no to sex or appearing on television,” Vidal groused, “but if I’d known it involved Bill Buckley I’d have made an exception.”





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [sharkie](https://archiveofourown.org/users/sharkie/gifts).



> I saw "I'd love an exposé written in the distant future revealing that they secretly continued an angry sexual correspondence until their deaths" and it ate my entire brain. Here is my effort at that exposé, as well as some supplemental materials concerning the impression this badly-concealed relationship might have left on other people at the time.

_Excerpts from EXPERIENCING GORE, ENCOUNTERING BILL: The Decades-Long Affair Between Gore Vidal and William F. Buckley, Jr as Revealed in their Correspondence, Photographs, and Interviews With Those Who Knew Them_

A friend of Vidal's recorded in his diary that Vidal, after an afternoon of drinking at La Rondinaia, was asked about his best celebrity fuck. “Howard [Austen, Vidal's partner] started to laugh and jabbed him in the ribs, at which he became annoyed and in his most indignant patrician manner, pronounced, “Howard thinks it’s Bill Buckley. He’s wrong.” Howard rolled his eyes. I asked him about it later and he said, “He thinks I don’t know about it, but they carried on for years, after those debates. For all I know they might still be corresponding.”

**The correspondence**

The relationship began during the pair's infamous debates on ABC in 1968, in which Vidal was selected to represent the liberal and Buckley the conservative perspective. According to accounts by both participants, the relationship had already begun before Buckley's infamous near-violent outburst after being called a "crypto-fascist" by Vidal during the ninth debate. 

This suggestion was borne out by Vidal's friend. "I once asked him, you know, when he said that, were you two--" the friend recounted, "and he looked directly at me and said, what did it look like? To me, that's a yes. Watch those debates and tell me there wasn't something else going on there."

In one debate Vidal refers to the National Review as the "magazine whose name will not pass my lips" and Buckley cuts in "We know you let nothing sully your lips" and Vidal chuckles, then retorts, "You'll eat it first." 

Recently unearthed writings suggest that this exchange indeed reflected a relationship that had become sexual. 

From a missing chapter of Vidal's 1994 memoir,  _Palimpsest_ : 

_I had long suspected the kind of thing that Buckley was really amenable to, and his halting, gawkish proposition, after the second debate (or was it the third?), when it did come, was unsurprising. Although he did not particularly attract me I determined to venture forth with him and see whether there was any truth to the promise of his dialectic. No sooner were we alone than he dropped to his knees. Thus did I begin to have some inkling of how he entertained the far right. It seemed that this blow-job was his area of expertise, and he went to it with a will. I well recall his somewhat rodent-like mien, his sounds of self-satisfaction. I suffered this for some time, moved by his rather transparent readiness to take whatever I would deign to give, before putting a stop to it._

_He was a less unpleasant specimen than advertised; there was a coppery tuft of hair below the swell of his buttocks. I fingered it. He seemed delighted at this discovery, and treated me to the sort of vocal appreciation he generally reserved for the policies of Ronald Reagan. I palmed the smooth curve of his nether cheek; he gazed trustfully at me over his shoulder, batting his limpid blue eyes. The subsequent evening I took no small delight in watching him squirm uncomfortably in his chair as I dismantled his arguments piece by piece. It would not be the only occasion on which I left him gasping at a loss for words. I suspect his experience had been largely with trade; once begun, it seemed no great mystery to either of us what was bound to ensue._

_We later took a somewhat sordid hotel of the kind that will be found in beach towns; our first encounter had been in my trailer, our next, in his, but our (for want of a more precise word) desires soon outstripped the opportunities provided by these spaces. He was a willing and enthusiastic participant, indeed an obstreperous and demanding one, in vices that would no doubt startle the subscription base of the National Review -- though not_ too _much. The window had shades that would not quite be closed._ _Bill raised his head from the pillow to look up at me; off to our right the light impinging on the slats gave both of us and the room stripes. He stared at me a moment - I see this part very clearly now, sun-browned forehead streaked with sweat, half covered with the mess of his dirt-gold hair -- then he sighed as his head dropped back onto the pillow. He will deny the encounter. I for my part merely wish I could state that it had ended there. But we kept it up for the remainder of the debates, then later-- cover the children's ears! -- in the offices of the National Review, and even for some time after that, a length of time that staggers the mind. I cannot recollect whether I ever deliberately pleased him at all, though he seemed satisfied regardless (perhaps this, then, was a species of the trickle-down economics of which Reagan sang so plangently?)_

_At the Democratic Convention Paul [Newman] gave me an earful about it when he caught Buckley departing from my trailer in modified chagrin. "What was Buckley doing there, Gore?" he wanted to know. "Doing?" I replied. "He was being done." Newman wasn't amused, and told me I ought to have better taste. I demurred. "I suspect I've just given Bill Buckley the best sex of his life," I told him, "and he'll never be able to speak a word of it to anyone." This, by the by, was confirmed by Buckley himself, during an uncharacteristic moment of candor some years later, as we were reprising the practice. "Don't ever tell anyone this, Gore," he panted -- he sweated more than anyone I had ever had the dubious enjoyment of enjoying -- "but you are the ne plus ultra." (Was his usage correct? I suspect, as usual, it was not.)_

_Let history say what it will about William F. Buckley, Jr.; he was certainly a sodomite and fellator par excellence; if he had confined himself to these rather harmless practices and not taken up magazine writing in his inimitable and impenetrable style he might, on net, have supplied pleasure to the world rather than otherwise._

From an early draft of William F. Buckley, Jr's 1969 essay for Esquire "On Experiencing Gore Vidal." (It would have been included in the section before his description of Vidal's political philosophy although his reasons for excising it will be evident.)

 _I don’t know what bearing this has on the subject at hand. Perhaps none. Still I set it down to determine the extent to which it colored my own sentiments as we approached the moment of what commenters at the time decried as a distasteful exercise in bitchery._  
  
_Vidal crowed so triumphantly over the conclusion of his first performance that I determined to pay a visit to his trailer to see if we might, like gentlemen, discuss the matter of altering the format. He answered the door rather grandly, brown curls clinging damply to his forehead, still redolent of cream, and beamed at me. “Well, what is it, Mr. Buckley?” he inquired in his somewhat feline tone._  
  
_I asked if I might come in. He answered in the affirmative. He may have made some sally; I don't recollect._  
  
_I don’t remember precisely what conversation ensued. He smelled good. I thought I would ask him what the scent was so as to purchase some for my mother. I told him that I had found our exchange distasteful and that I didn't appreciate his suggestion that I was some sort of neurosis (a word never used again in this sense) who was going to blow the world to pieces if given the opportunity. He accused me of putting words in his mouth._  
  
_“Much better than what you commonly put in your mouth,” I retorted._

 _At this he turned upon me a look of infinite benevolence and patience. “Sadly transparent,” he said._  
  
_I told him I had no very clear idea what he meant._  
  
_“Yes, you do,” he said. I am certain it was he who kissed me. We fell upon his sofa together in a kind of mutual maenadic frenzy. At the time I was conscious only of the desire not to be bested by him. He undid my flies and signaled his approval of my dimensions as his hand began its ministrations. Determined that I should not be the passive participant in this encounter, I did likewise, though I think I gave no sign of approbation. He was constructed along somewhat above average lines, if what I had glimpsed at Yale in more innocent contexts was anything to measure by; perhaps Freud might be able to construe something from this fact._  
  
_“That's much better, isn't it-- ah-- Bill?” he exclaimed._  
  
_I responded in somewhat more Anglo-Saxon terms; he shut me up. I shall draw the curtain upon what ensued._  
  
_No, I think I had better not. I was, to my own chagrin, quite close to giving him the satisfaction of being the first to arrive, and I had no wish to see this knowledge reflected on his smug visage for the next nine nights. A counter-sally of some sort was in order; boldly, I assayed. He manifested a certain surprise at my willingness to assume such an attitude, followed by an equally grating smugness as his long patrician fingers gripped my hair._

 _It required little effort on my part to push him to the brink and I think he glimpsed my self-satisfaction at placing him so plainly at my mercy._  
  
_“Very — ah — good, Bill,” he muttered, in an abstracted tone, head lolling back, eyes falling shut. He had long eyelashes like a Venus Fly Trap._  
  
_When I had dispensed with him he resumed his previous ministrations with an exploratory boldness I had not foreseen, one hand foraying towards a region he has been manifestly captivated by in his published writings. It was not this that caused me to reach completion, though by his smug look I could tell that should he ever recount this encounter he would not hesitate to number me among his so-inclined conquests. It is this loose and casual relationship with fact that was such a source of consternation to me in the course of our debates._  
  
_We did not resolve the matter of the format on that occasion nor, the following evening, when he manifested himself in my trailer and arched a suggestive eyebrow at me. I suppose I could have responded otherwise than I did. I felt once more that I must not allow him to get the better of me, and I suppose on the second occasion I acquitted myself as well, perhaps with more gusto._  
  
_That there was a third occasion I must note with a degree of chagrin, in a hotel, as well as that he ventured into that undiscovered country or bourne from which no traveler returns. He was almost immediately overcome, as I had suspected he would be, and could not refrain from expressing his approbation in somewhat florid terms. I am not entirely sure that I am proud to be the recipient of such compliments from such an evangelist for the erosion of public morality, but he has made little secret of his experience in this realm and in that respect at least my showing must be deemed an honorable one. (“Whatever you are, be a good one,” didn’t Lincoln say?)_

From the published version of Buckley's 1969 essay, "Experiencing Gore Vidal": 

"In the interval between Miami and Chicago, I read Myra Breckinridge. I have thought and thought about it, and resolved finally to describe and evaluate it and its purposes mostly by quoting from reviewers of the novel who cannot be suspected of sexual or cultural home-guardism.... From Myra, a sample -- a bowdlerized sample --: "I touched the end of his spine, a rather proturberant bony tip set between the high curve of buttocks now revealed to me in all their splendor... and splendor is the only word to describe them! Smooth, white, hairless except just beneath the spinal tip where a number of dark coppery hairs began, only to disappear from view. Casually I ran my hand over the smooth slightly damp cheeks. To the touch they were like highly polished marble warmed by the sun of some perfect Mediterranean day. I even allowed my forefinger the indiscretion of fingering the coppery wires not only at the tip of the spine but also the ticker growth at the back of his thighs. Like so many young males, he has a relatively hairless torso with heavily furred legs..." 

Letters between Vidal and Buckley, late 1969 - August 1970

Dear Bill Buckley,

What are we to discern from this essay of yours, besides that you’re a very attentive reader of Myra Breckinridge, evidently going through with bold strokes of the pen (Freudian?) to mark passages of which you disapproved for later consumption? This is pitiful. You write at one point of my “massaging my Weltzschmerz with masturbatory diligence”(sic?) are you sure you haven’t something else in mind? The only masturbatory diligence that massages my weltschmerz, to borrow your quaint and ungainly phrase, is your own in compiling this article. How many times did you shoot off to Myra? I thought it satire; you seem to find it pornography. It is the spectator and not the artist that art truly mirrors, as Wilde (occasionally right, if so mired in paradox he could not see it) had it, or, in the words of the learned judge: obscenity is in the groin of the beholder. I won’t be offended by any number you produce; quite the contrary. Perhaps we could even place a blurb on the inside cover stating that the editor of That Magazine objected to it, strenuously throughout. And I can well imagine the face you made, and the sudden quivering of your curiously smooth thighs, as your indignation shot through you. Had I realized in writing it that it would bring you such great pleasure, I might not — but we must let regret go by. Did you bite your lip to keep the sounds from reaching your ever-diligent staff of Commie-haters and John Birch acolytes, as your fingers clenched on the pen with which you hastily dash off those columns? Or did James Burnham, bent heavily to his work, hearken to that curious strangled gasp of yours, as your darting tongue sought the corner of your mouth? Has he often hearkened thus? Write soon and tell me. The reading public awaits the next installment!

Dear Mr. Vidal,  
I think your letter in exceptionally poor taste. James Burnham! I fear that any response will further your indulgence in these sad masturbatory fantasies, but if it can spare the public at large, I will bear the brunt of it. It is at best a dubious honor to feature in such an imagination as yours; one reflects glumly that this has been the unhappy fate of thousands, as heartburn or kidney disease. I certainly never derived any enjoyment from Myra Breckinridge in the offices of the National Review, and I wouldn’t have been caught dead reading it in the presence of James Burnham. Someone else might regard it as touching to be the subject of such silky and sensuous prose (I had little idea you took such great notice of my thighs! Myrabile dictu) but I don’t consider your caricature to be particularly fetching. I suppose you wrote this from where you expatriate yourself for (America laments), only a portion of the year; I am I suppose flattered that the only thought capable of bringing you off in the midst of all that Italian sun is that of me. You said you enjoyed exciting people. Very interesting. I discover you wish you had excited me. More interesting still. Well, Myra is hardly calculated to do that. As a rule your books seldom do, and your conversation even less. Physically you are unobjectionable, if, perhaps, somewhat unbecomingly vain of it. Your book jacket pictures — full lips pursed, eyebrow quirked in suggestion, ostentatiously neat — could be placed with little alteration in the back of the East Village Other; what would one suspect you to be advertising for? I have my suspicions, furtively consulting my own inclinations. But let us leave that to your filthy imagination; here there be dragons!  
  
Dear Bill,  
What a strange muddle your letter is! You cannot stand the implication that I inspired any excitement on your part; you rave about my lips — “physically you are unobjectionable!” Don’t hold back, now— you suggest quite innocently another scenario you know to be perfectly lewd — it is of a piece with all your published writings, dashed off one-handedly with great sound and fury, signifying: what? Simply this: that Bill Buckley would like to continue this little exercise, please and thank you, and may he have another? He may. I am not ungenerous. (I noted, by the by, your limp little pun.) I shall continue upon your suggested theme until the bell rings. (All this talk of the writing of themes puts me to mind of boarding school. There, we narrowly missed one another; thank heaven for small mercies. What would I have done with Wee Willie Buckley, the upperclassmen, gawky in his school tie with the beginnings of stubble and long thin bony legs, ass nonexistent, the year before his greatly exaggerated army service and toiling in the still more egregious trenches of (angels and ministers of grace defend us!) Yale. Were you any more difficult to make then than now? I suspect you always managed to affect surprise.) To return to your matter of advertisements; I have always found paying for sex to be the simplest approach. What should I pay you for, and how much? Remember, Bill, supply and demand.

Dear Gore,  
I would have suspected you a Keynesian? “We must pay men to make holes and pay men to fill them.” I will have you know I was an equestrian in high school; you would have had no complaints in that department. What were you? Precocious only in your perversion, I suspect, too willing to grapple with any schoolmate at loose ends. Very well between parties who understand one another, but your habit of dedicating books to them afterwards seems another matter. (Imagine my poor mother’s face at seeing To WFB in the frontispiece Of The City and the Pillar!) It is hardly a consummation to be wished, devoutly or otherwise. Though perhaps then you weren’t too grand for certain pursuits you profess to be too grand for now. Were you ever a virgin? For it not to be so is impossible (litotes, note!) yet I can’t imagine your first time; you boast of your lack of guilt or inhibition, but surely you must have stifled some blush of surprise the first time someone laid hands (or mouth) on your sex. I know that on subsequent occasions you have affected an easiness about it all but I would like to have seen you before you remembered not to be surprised. Perhaps — what did you call him?— young Will Buckley could have made you surprised. I suspect he could have, tall, with a charming and precocious smile and sun-flecked gold hair. You’d have been thrilled.

Dear Bill,  
O vanity! Sun-flecked gold hair! A charming and precocious smile! Your masturbatory diligence is indeed profound. How proficient were you, in those days? The veil begins to be lifted; the scales drop from the traveler’s eyes; a shout goes up from the tents of the uncircumcised. You are characteristically both prudish and indiscreet. From your incoherent scribble we deduce: you wish to have been blown by the young author of Williwaw. The desire of many. What could you have done to merit it? Have you any pictures of this remarkable young Adonis that I may judge for myself his effect? Perhaps astride the unfortunate horse?

Dear Gore,  
Merely as a matter of testamentary integrity I am enclosing the following. Let me know if it is conducive to tumescence. The horse’s name was Pickles.  

Dear Bill,  
Pickles looks rather glum. (“Why the long face?”) You could have done without the trophy. I see that my appraisal of your bony legs has been borne out by facts. You look, as usual, too pleased with yourself. I suspect, of the two, Pickles is the wiser. Wee Willie Buckley has a look of (studied?) innocence to him, though, as usual, he can’t seem to keep his mouth shut. He seems unconscious of his charm; the most taxing of all poses. The jodhpurs are execrable and lend no credence to your bold asseverations.  
What are you smiling at? It cannot be the horse. You look pleased by some private joke; probably something misheard. And why are you standing next to the equine? All in all I think I would prefer to see you mounted.

Dear Gore,  
This is simply to say I think your puns odious and I won’t admit them. Why don’t you send me a picture yourself as penance? If no decent pictures exist (an event I fear is likelier than the alternative, considering the subject) send an indecent one.

Dear Bill,  
There!  
Don’t show James Burnham.

Dear Mr. Vidal,  
I think if I showed these to Burnham the shock would kill him. I shall keep them in reserve in a desk drawer with a false bottom, lest he do something to displease me! I consider the first insufferably coy and the second insufferably — the word is certainly not coy. I am not sure what the word is. I should be clear: I possess more than a sufficient store of words --among them brazen, meretricious, estrous— but I consider them not quite up to the Herculean task in question. Gorgon-esque, perhaps; enough to turn the beholder to stone in an instant.

Dear Bill,  
From someone who claims to be above puns this is rather obvious, and that is not touching on your office drawer with its false bottom (if there is to be touching upon drawers and bottoms, let none be false, etc, I will hum the first bars and you can guess at the remainder of the melody). So you liked the pictures, did you? Now you see my prognosticative power; if you were not stemming the imaginative rose in the offices of that unspeakable little magazine before, you will certainly have done so now, arrayed amongst your Nixon paraphernalia and syndication receipts, perhaps with your feet still up on your desk, mouth hanging open as you shuck your pants to reveal the dubious splendor of your buttocks, panting not (as all good subscribers duly expect) for Goldwater, God, and Country but for someone altogether else. Suppose the phone were to ring at such an inopportune moment? I pity the poor soul calling to cancel his subscription who is to be met with your badly-stifled grunts of pleasure. He will return to his dinner table in Peoria a sadly chastened man.

Dear Gore,  
You might consider calling — but as you are not a National Review subscriber I would of course not bother picking up. I am unhappily (note the axiomatic word) compelled to note that the goings-on in the sanctum sanctorum of the National Review seem to be a recurring fantasy of yours. It does you some credit; you may be, and sadly often are, in the gutter, but at least you are looking at the stars.  
PS Our number is [redacted] if you wish to hear what I am actually doing in place of what you picture. Or you are welcome to drop by at any time you are in the country! I will give you the tour and you may shake James Burnham by the hand and detail to him the part he plays in the recurring phantasmagoria of your lewd imagination. Then I shall lead you to the desk that you will find, I fear, insufficiently sturdy for such ventures as you picture, that you may sigh for another failure of reality to live up to the workings of your febrile mind.

Bill,  
Do I dream, or did you just — in your rather diffuse and ungainly prose style — invite me to the offices of the National Review to fuck you over your desk? These are, frankly, the only circumstances in which I can envision paying your Nameless Magazine a visit, and even then I only barely relish the prospect enough to consider it. To be perfectly candid, the idea of having you on that desk had not occurred to me, but it is touching that it occurred to you. No doubt it is this tireless ingenuity that has helped to endear you to the far right. Let me know if it is a serious offer, Bill.

Dear Gore,  
As is proper in the case of inquiries directed to me in my capacity as editor of the National Review, the response to your question will appear in my Notes & Asides column in the next issue. Be sure to buy a copy!

From the Notes & Asides column of the National Review, July 28, 1970  
Confidential to G — I believe the offer to have been a serious one, and I strongly advise you to take it up. Do not worry about the desk.

Dear Bill,  
I did not pay for the issue, but I managed to read your reply. Now I wonder what other assignations are being kept in the pages of your odious little magazine! Very well. I am less and less shocked by the consistently low quality of your output and more impressed that you manage to get anything written at all, you slut (write me with the synonym you would prefer; I have no doubt your thesaurus is amply supplied with them.) I shall be in New York next month; we shall see what ensues.

From “Athwart History Yelling Stop” a self-published 1983 memoir by a former National Review intern.

“Chapter 3: The Burglary”

In the summer of 1970 I was witness to many coruscating instances of WFB’s rapier wit, but none so memorable as on the night that we surprised the burglar in the offices of the National Review. Surprisingly little has been written of this incident, and Buckley himself has never alluded to it in any of his published writing — the great may afford such modesty, but those of us fit only to affix the thong of his sandal must set down what scraps we can!

I had left a cherished paper clip on my desk that evening and was returning to claim it. The office was dark, but I could have sworn I heard the sound of laughter, followed by the opening and shutting of a door. I waited; heard nothing more; convinced myself it was just my imagination (as the song goes) running away with me. I slipped my key into the lock and slid the door open, listening. Nothing. I proceeded to my desk, where I retrieved the paper clip and marveled at the stillness of a place so often a beehive of activity, when I became dawningly conscious of a faint thumping noise, as one might hear at a motel in a city with a Democratic mayor. I waited. It stopped, then resumed, this time accompanied by a masculine grunt. I went still. My palms grew damp. I strained to listen. It was, I realized, coming from the Editor’s office. For a moment I stood paralyzed with indecision. Then I realized: a burglar was seeking access to his priceless cache of writings. I decided to cry out.

Then another sound— a cry! My first thought was the kind of thing that simply could not occur in the National Review; my second, that someone was being killed. All became clear. Mr. Buckley, returning late as I had, had been surprised over his desk by some vicious intruder.

“STOP,” I cried (yes, I stood amidst the office of the National Review yelling “Stop!”) “STOP, THIEF!” I was quaking. 

Then, from behind the door, came the reassuring notes of an unmistakable voice. “Don’t worry, Connor.” (He remembered my name.) “The burglar has been subdued. I have seen to it.” 

I think sometimes that I heard a stifled giggle, but as this is impossible I have discarded it.

 “I am glad to hear it, sir,” I said. ”Shall I come in and help?”

“No, Connor,” the Great Lion said. “I don’t think that will be necessary.” I approached the door.

“I can stand guard while you call the police,” I suggested.

Mr. Buckley emerged from his office. He looked as if he had been engaged in subduing a burglar; his tie was crooked and his hair askew, and there was a rather painful looking mark on his neck, almost as if someone had bitten him. Evidently the burglar had not been afraid to fight dirty.

“I think the police have better things to do with their time,” Buckley said. “The mind of this unfortunate man has been preyed upon by leftist agitators but after I remonstrated with him” I took him to mean fisticuffs “he has seen the error of his ways and agreed to a full year’s subscription.”

Such was the power of the proverbial Buckley sock to the goddam jaw! I stood in awe of him.

“I will escort him out,” he continued. “I’d thank you not to make much of this incident, Connor; these things happen from time to time, and I find in the long run it is better to try to reform than to punish. We’ll precede you.”

“Certainly, sir,” I said. “I will go get my paper clip.” 

“Of course, Connor.” 

Mr. Buckley re-entered his office and led a figure out; they were approximately the same height and for a burglar the man was nattily dressed. I did not catch sight of his face. But I can vouch that the subscriber base of the National Review increased by one that night!

 

From the Buckley-Vidal correspondence, 1970-1971 

Dear Gore,

Shall we elect never to allude to that incident again? All in favor?

PS I told you not above the collar.

 

Dear Bill,

No, no, by all means, let’s allude to it continually. Are you aware that all the interns at your infernal magazine — peculiarly ill-favored boys, like Theaetetus but without his redeeming impertinence; they look etiolated, like those sad plants reputed to bloom only by moonlight— are in love with you? Not since Nancy first beheld Ronald have I spied a gaze of such mute adoration; such an effect you have! That one — Oliver? No relation to North, I hope — was even aping your hair, as though you’d elected to look that way. What a dispiriting mirror admiration holds up! What would they not do? And what a disappointment you would prove to them, if they only knew where your inclinations lay in that regard. I will not buy next month’s issue but I will look over it on the news-stands with increased interest, knowing exactly what has transpired on the desk where it is brought forth with pain into the world. Next year on the set of Firing Line!

PS I wasn’t paying attention. Or I thought you wore a larger collar. Pick the excuse best suited to the occasion. Perhaps you will be forced to bring back the ascot.

PPS One of the characters in my new book is starting to bear a certain curious resemblance to you, even the ears. Do not worry; he is quite a minor figure with no bearing on the plot.

 

Dear Gore,

Here I thought us to be consulting your own inclinations! I have no so marked preference in the matter as you seem to believe. You are too quick to ascribe these things to others. 

A better question might be: is there any character in the (dubiously) publishable works of Gore Vidal whom you will not claim to have based upon me? Watch out! I may base a character on you, if you are not careful, and be warned: your vanity will not withstand such a portrait!

Really, the set of Firing Line too? Is there anywhere you _don’t_ want it? This is all very flattering to me but I imagine it must be a bit mortifying for you to admit. Where did you picture, exactly?

 


	2. Chapter 2

 

**Onscreen**

The pair's undeniable screen chemistry fueled rumors of a liaison during numerous television appearance in the 70's.  

An infamous celebrity episode of $25,000 Pyramid that paired the two never made it to air after they demolished every category in the pyramid with forty seconds remaining and demanded fresh questions. “I said, we can’t air this, right?” host Dick Clark recalled. “They said, why not, there’s nothing obscene in it. I said, watch it yourself. Gore gets “things that protrude” because Bill sticks out his tongue in a suggestive manner. They don’t break eye contact. We were in the editing room and one of the guys turns to me and says, ‘They’re fucking,’ and — no one disagreed.”

A surviving clip still available on YouTube features Vidal describing his celebrity partner as “the ineffable Bill Buckley.” Buckley turns to him with flashing eyes and says,  _“Ineffable_ , am I?” to which Vidal replies “Unspeakable, then,” with a sideways look. Betty White and Richard Dawson, the other celebrity pair, allude to the exchange when it is their turn. “Ms. White, I’m married, but I’m sure you are effable,” Dawson says, and the show cuts to commercial.

Similar incidents had occurred on a number of other shows, including Match Game, on which Buckley and Vidal to their own evident and increasing consternation kept producing the same off-the-wall responses to the questions. “I think Bill is looking over my shoulder,” Vidal exclaims at one point, to which Buckley retorts, “I am sure Mr. Vidal frequently fantasizes that I am looking over his shoulder” and the camera cuts to Charles Nelson Reilly rolling his eyes and making a suggestive gesture. “I think you two had better take this outside,” host Gene Rayburn says “except that you might frighten the horses,” and the other celebrities smother laughter. “I’m sure I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Reilly says.

A special edition of Tattletales that sought to showcase unexpected famous television duos placed them on the same team in the yellow “banana” section. The show also featured William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy, and Charles Nelson Reilly and Fannie Flagg.

“I never say no to sex or appearing on television,” Vidal groused, before the lights went up, “but if I’d realized it involved Bill Buckley I would have made an exception.”

“Hm,” Buckley said, frostily, “in actual matter of fact I doubt that's true.”

Flagg remembered the interaction later. “Charles Nelson Reilly whispered that they had been fighting. And I said, I thought they were always fighting, and he said, yes, but they’re usually also fucking.”

“The funny thing,” host Bert Convy recollected later, “was that both of them immediately said yes, and we did explain the concept, even though they both carried on quite indignantly about it. We didn’t believe they’d say yes. But both of them must have thought it would show the other one up. Then we had to scramble to make the show happen.” A transcript follows. 

Q: What would the other person like to change most about himself?

BUCKLEY: Unfortunately for America, nothing at all.

Q: Nothing?

BUCKLEY: I’m sure of it.

Q: How about it Mr. Vidal? What would you like to change most about yourself?

VIDAL: Why, Bert, nothing!

BUCKLEY: Ha!

VIDAL: Oh, did he?

BUCKLEY: Yes, Mr. Vidal, you’re unfortunately quite predictable.

VIDAL: Oh am I, you—

Q: Let's see about moving on. 

 

Later in the show

 

Q: What doesn’t he want you to know he does?

VIDAL: He’s so unfortunately transparent that I have very little idea of what he would be attempting to conceal. Perhaps. He reads all my books. That, or his endorsement of the bombing of the Chinese nuclear capacity. It is this sort of bloodthirsty neurosis that has so endeared him to the population at large.

Q: What don't you want Mr. Vidal to know that you do?

BUCKLEY: Give any thought to him at all. Because frankly I don't. Although I have read his books. 

VIDAL: There! 

 

Q: How would he describe you?

BUCKLEY: He claims to base most of his works on me so I suspect there are many ways. Mr. Myra Breckinridge. No, I know. Perhaps he will say. Ah. If Bette Davis had been to Yale.

Q: How would you describe him? 

VIDAL: How indeed! An appalling subject. If Bette Davis had been to Yale, she would be William F. Buckley. 

BUCKLEY: HA! 

VIDAL: Oh for God’s sake, did you really, Bill?

BUCKLEY: We’re winning. 

VIDAL: Yes. Well, good for you, Bill. Very good.

BUCKLEY: Have you anything else to say?

VIDAL: Not in the presence of these people.

...

Q: What do you fight about?

VIDAL: Politics. 

...

BUCKLEY: Politics.

...

Q: Which doesn’t a man talk about with his friends? Sex, money, or politics? 

VIDAL: He’ll say sex. I cannot say I entirely blame him. I can’t imagine wanting to discuss sex with James Burnham.

BUCKLEY: Ah, sex, I believe, though indeed of the subjects mentioned it may be the least sordid. Is that what he said?

VIDAL: I knew you and Whittaker Chambers weren’t exchanging tales of your mutual and dubious prowess.

BUCKLEY: All right, shut up, Mr. Vidal.

 

Q: What would he say is his most appealing characteristic?

VIDAL: His intellect. There is precious little of that, but what else is there?

BUCKLEY: My ah intellectual capacity, though I suspect he said something insulting.

VIDAL: Full marks, Bill. Yale’s shining light, as always. A beacon and a lesson to us all.

[BUCKLEY mimes blowing a kiss.]

 

“I had heard there was something, but there were a lot of rumors in those days, but after seeing them— there was definitely something,” Flagg confirmed.

 They won over $1000. “They left together,” Convy remembered. “Buckley got into a taxi and then Vidal came along and said “Wait, you horror” and got in with him. I think they made up.”


	3. Chapter 3

**The file**

Leading to the discovery of the pair's relationship was a file of correspondence, long thought to have been discarded by Buckley's son upon his death, mistakenly labeled VIDAL LEGAL. Although some of it pertained to the exhausting lawsuit carried on between Vidal and Buckley for decades, much of it was actually correspondence of a more private nature. These decades of sexually charged, sesquipedalian-rich correspondence included some highlights — a morning-after note from Buckley apparently scrawled on the stationery of a Swiss hotel; surprisingly intimate “blackmail” photographs taken on a joint yacht excursion, and reams of letters. (The photographs have since disappeared into a private collection, rumored to be the same one that contains the Jimmy Carson sex tape.) 

 _The photographs, according to a catalog of the collection:_   
  
[Vidal in swim trunks on the deck of Buckley’s yacht, flipping off the camera]   
  
[Vidal in swim trunks, looking suggestively into the camera]   
  
[Vidal on the deck of Buckley’s yacht, swim trunks on the deck of Buckley’s yacht]    
  
[overexposed]   
  
[Buckley in bed below decks, apparently nude, glancing cheekily up at photographer]

“They’re very personal photographs,” confirmed the curator of Vidal’s papers at Harvard, who helped catalog them. “They’re just, intimate, I guess you would say. And the looks Gore is giving the photographer in some of them! Like he’s going to eat you alive. Hot stuff. Especially the last one, without the swim trunks, when he’s about to jump into the water and has sort of a come-hither look, and, Gore Vidal knew how to give you a come-hither look.” This one is signed "Hmph! Vidal" on the back.

Buckley is also captured on the deck of the boat, from behind, then in another snapshot where he turns and notices the photographer and appears to be making a remark; also included in the set is a shot of him lying nude on his stomach on an unmade bed, apparently reading, followed by two more in which he turns to look at the camera, first indignantly, then suggestively. “There’s a certain vulnerability to it, definitely a trust, that is undercut by a brisk hand-written note on the back of the picture that reads “FOR BLACKMAIL! Ho ho ho” They’re extraordinary pictures. You can see why someone would hang on to them.”

_The hotel note:_

I regret that I cannot stay to take in the immeasurably thrilling and perverse sight of Mr. Gore Vidal for once with his mouth shut – [heavily crossed out]  I suppose we will see each other.  
  
Dear Bill,  
In re: your note. Surely you know there are other ways to shut me up. Or is this too low and vulgar for you? I confess to being quite stymied by your redaction. What was it that you dared not let me see? I peered at the hotel pad under a light with a magnifying glass, for all the world like a hotel detective, to no avail. So I must have you tell me. What, pray tell, was your confession? I am heartily afraid it was the halting outpouring of a sort of clumsy affection. You were right to pluck it out. I have no use for it, and I scarcely believe it from you.  


Dear Gore,  
For a purveyor of degenerate filth you entirely lack imagination, but it is no matter. I shall leave it to yours. Do you really hope for a declaration of love? Now it is I who must pity you. How it must rankle to be so utterly taken with me, whom you profess to despise, that a careless scribble is shadowed forth with deep significance? I fear it will break your heart when I tell you it was an attempt at something vulgar and needless to say I broke it off, embarrassed and proud at once that I lacked your fluency in such pornographic matters.   


Bill,  
Damn you, now you have got to tell me.   


Dear Gore,  
I won’t.   
Kisses, Bill   


Bill,  
You will suffer for this insolence when I next see you.   


Dear Gore,  
So we’re to see each other, hm? I thought you issued a ukase against it, the last time. What are we to conclude from this? A distressing lack of resolution on your part. Up with such shilly-shallying we shall not put!   
PS I read you've slept with Kerouac. Who was better?   


Bill,  
Kerouac.

_The two were deeply fascinated by their cameos in one another’s writings and wrote extensively to one another on the subject. After the publication of Burr, Buckley wrote:_

Dear Gore,  
I have read “Burr” with some interest. I am touched you felt the need to dedicate so much time to my portrait, inaccurate though it is. I fear it is the artist and not the subject that art reveals. I must draw your attention especially to the following passage:   
  
“In Broadway, I suddenly found myself face to face with William de la Touche Clancey. (Subtle, this!)   
“Well!” A long drawn-out syllable in which fear and condescension were unpleasantly mingled (passable stuff, almost comprehensible!). “What is the young Old Patroon about to turn his hand to next?”   
“The Vauxhall gardens, I should think.” My dislike of Clancey is almost physical. (almost? Interesting.) Yet I stare at him with fascination;” (I’ll say you do, Mr. Vidal! I almost blush for you) “note that his protuberant eyes are yellowish; that he scratches himself compulsively; that his tongue darts in and out of his mouth like a lizard’s catching flies.”

So attentive, yet inaccurate; of a piece with the majority of your work.    
And then!   
“I don’t believe that poor sick Mr. Leggett would command a high price in the bazaar,” you have me say. “You, on the other hand, ought to fetch a pretty price.” (More interesting still.)   
“More than the usual two dollars you pay?” Two dollars is the current rate for a male prostitute. (And how does the narrator know this, pray? Charles Schermerhorn Schuyler!) “Much more! Why, just for those pink Dutch cheeks alone!”

My ever-beloved Mr. Vidal, I think it rather telling that you feel compelled not merely to dragoon this impossible facsimile of me into your book, but to oblige him to flirt with your narrator so openly. What do you suppose transpired after this exchange? Charlie protests a good deal, to be sure, but I have my suspicions. Mark my words, all these insults will lead to something else, and poor Charlie’s pink Dutch cheeks will bear the brunt of it.   
  
Dear Bill,   
Go boil your head. Do you take such behavior to be flirtation? One pities you. Clancey is certainly not going to fuck the narrator, as you imply. I don’t think anyone but you would read it this way; it is characteristic of your paranoid mind to see connections where none exist.   
  
Dear Gore,   
You sound nervous. I didn’t say I was going to fuck your poor narrator. It is telling that the thought occurred to you. By the by, how about it? I’m sure you’re a better lay than Charles Schmermerhorn Schuyler; he doesn’t convince.   
  
Dear Bill,   
I’m sure I am, but that’s not the point. The point is your spinning, as usual, absurd conclusions from nothing at all. This is typical of your paranoid style. I make it clear that the narrator is disgusted by Clancey; it could not possibly appear as anything else, unless I am very much mistaken indeed.   
  
Dear Gore,   
You are always very much mistaken. I’ve riled you, haven’t I? I wish I were there to glimpse it; Gore Vidal, rattled, sweating over his manuscript pages to see where he slipped up. Fear not! No one will take it as anything other than a sign that your taste in men may have improved. Let me complete the picture that so discomfits you, then, that you may include it in subsequent editions! “He filed ahead of me up the staircase. Upstairs, doors were open, one on the right, the other on the left, to bedrooms with jumbo-sized beds and dim lights. Clancey darted into the room on the left and began to undress. I followed him with a bad grace. He had paid me sufficient — that ought to mollify Charlie, who seems to have fewer scruples than we suspected; he certainly seems conversant with all the going rates! — for the undertaking to hold my interest, and I stripped for him. He made his approbation known, sliding an appreciative finger down the front of my trousers. (Let us make it clear that Charlie is respectably endowed; that should please you.) He sank to his knees before me and favored me with [if my study of your work is any guide this would be what you would deem an ideal opportunity to offer some bewildering insult about the magazine] the kind of lip service his magazine pays to the worst ideas. I was — let’s see — less unreceptive to his ministrations than I might have been, and had to muffle my noises (don’t think I don’t notice!) until I spent myself with a cry, my handsome face contorted in a most peculiar spasm. He insisted on kissing me (the caricature you’ve drawn would; I surely don’t; as is sadly often your case you like it more than you admit) until my mouth became pliant beneath his attentions. I had begun to tug at his clothing in order to establish some rough parity between us; he batted my hands away and settled me on the bed. There, he undertook something that surprised me. In my defense, words had reintroduced themselves between us and I, wishing to shut him up, had made a rather vulgar suggestion; that he took me up on it I attempted to greet with a nonchalance I did not feel as I straddled him and lowered myself over his chin.”

I cannot possibly justify another page of this; leave that kind of over-scrupulous detail for Myra Breckinridge, and let it stop here with the end of the paper.   
  
Dear Bill,   
Running out of paper is a pretty thin excuse when you are so plainly dying to tell me what it would be like if I sat on your face. Do not let me stop you. Indeed, I am enclosing a blank page for you. Fear not; this will never approach Myra Breckinridge. Write without fear, and I will supply criticism.   
What to make of any of this? You seem to have been greatly excited by even the most insulting allusion to yourself. You are lubricious and perverse in the extreme; I always suspected as much, but the confirmation far outstrips my wildest — is hopes the word? It is good to see your hamstrung prose limping towards a climax, not that it has ever stimulated much in the way of moisture or tumescence. Is this what my writing sounds like, to your ears? Poor Midas Buckley, everything he touches turning to incomprehensible dross. I think your memory on some of these points (vis, my noises, if they are not entirely the misfirings of your quite feeble neurons, your somewhat pathetic willingness to be kissed) is highly doubtful and could use some refreshing. An unpleasant enough task and one I am not keen to take on. Much rides upon the contents of your next letter. Send me something to startle everyone else on the airplane. If you write in your habitual style no one will even guess it to be pornography.   
  
Dear Gore,   
Here is your sheet of paper again. I am sure your imagination vastly outstrips anything that my limping, hamstrung prose could possibly conjure up. If you don’t think your imagination adequate to the task (it isn’t, I fear) I see from the mention of the airplane that you are headed back to America. How about it, in plain Anglo Saxon? Let’s dispense with all the pleasantries and fuck. You may sit wherever you like. 

Also included in the file is a copy of Myra Breckinridge, inscribed “to Myron,” including three letters from Vidal folded into the book jacket. The first is a demand for a withheld letter; the second is a withering line-by-line critique of the style and content of the received letter and appeared to be the most often re-read of the letters, and the third included a photograph of Vidal. The second letter includes such lines as, “You write ‘To my chagrin (the human mind being a mystery to some degree even to its possessor) I find myself regarding the renewal of our connection with a certain frisson of anticipation, which makes me fear the immanentizing of the eschaton, if I can regard the prospect of being given over to the whims of such a depraved degenerate as yourself as a consummation devoutly to be wished.’” This is utter drivel. Immanentize the eschaton! The mystery of the human mind is a truism. What I asked for was filth, not drivel, but I suppose I should not be surprised that you are only capable of producing the latter and not the former. The bit about the consummation is pretty timid. You can do better. “When I consider what you can do with your mouth” you write, “and the appalling things your lips have paid service to, I shudder at the thought of putting them to any other use.” Better. What is this shudder? You seem to write this with fear and trembling, perpetually convulsed. Another of your odd compunctions.‘I suppose this is hardly what a reasonably well-informed reader would consider to be a naughty letter; you will be wanting specifics as to the particulars of each act to be performed. I shall give them you in Latin, then: pedicabo vos et irrumabo.” Charming, Bill, as always, but everyone knows Catullus said it and not you and furthermore if you were to make an honest declaration of intent it would be fellabo and pedicabos; you remind me of the ancient lines to the effect that irrumatio of Bill must be rendered impossible because Bill fellat. Perhaps your only redeeming vice. “I think the lines apt, don’t you? I have no wish for tenderness; the mere thought of you makes my hackles rise; but my hackles are not the only thing.” A sexual pun, Bill? That is below the belt. “Whenever I see you on television I am enraged afresh. I wonder that it’s permitted; every word you say is obscene, and you say them all so suggestively that I blush for you.” I do have such a remarkable impact on you, Bill. All shudders and blushes! But your repression is older and vaster than the pyramids. “That is what I think of, when I think of what will ensue when we are, in a manner of speaking, united— as the states are, which is to say, by no necessity save a crudely geographical one — the blissful moment when your speech ceases.” That is not how the states are united; greed, petty despotism, timidity, empire. I derive (I do not know why I bother to note) a similar bliss from stilling that serpent’s tongue of yours; unless it is busied elsewhere, another redeeming vice. “In fine, I loathe you every way I can think of, and probably more ways that you will have to teach me, when you arrive.” You need no tutor to be loathsome, Bill, you prodigy. I too find myself unaccountably exercised by the thought of you. Here is what you ought to have written; I will set you to write it out one hundred times in chalk until you have absorbed the lesson. I am fit only to perform such acts as the viewing public would faint dead away at, readily and with gusto.”

**Something more?**

The surprisingly dedicated correspondents never abandoned the pretext of mutual loathing — “It wasn’t a pretext!” Vidal acquaintance Scotty Bowers insisted. “They really did loathe each other! But they also liked to fuck.” — but some remarkable letters from the late seventies hint at a mutually discomfiting entanglement.

Dear Gore,  
What are we going to do about this dreadful mess? I fear I made rather an exhibition of myself, last time, only, remember, you said the same. Now I am at an utter loss as to how to proceed. I don’t know when this can have started to be the case. Such a statement from me to you or vice versa would not have been remotely credible a year or two ago; now I — I may as well confess it — believed it without a hemidemisemiquaver of doubt and was glad. But there’s nothing we can do about it, is there? I think we ought to just go on as if nothing had happened. I promise I won’t tell you so again, not even if we repeat the performance that occasioned it. I wish I could think of something else to do.   
  
Dear Bill,   
Believe me, I am as distressed by this turn of events as you are. I think perhaps we ought to spend more time together; that is sure to extirpate it. You must send me numerous examples of your prose style. Perhaps you should address me with endearments. I could scarcely withstand any billing and cooing from you, Bill (coo.) Where are you presently? I think I had better come there and put these salutary measures into practice; I don’t at all like the idea of letting this thing fester.   
  
Dear Gore,   
I agree, sweetheart. (Is this the kind of thing you had in mind?) I’m in Gstaat, toots(?); come watch as I indite my columns and I have no doubt you will be put right off. One query that has been puzzling me: do you think we had better put the kibosh on sleeping together, or redouble the effort, darling?   
  
Dear Bill,   
To be perfectly bleak and be perfectly blunt, I want you rather badly, which makes me think we had better redouble our efforts. Then again, this is one redeeming vice of yours and might inadvertently worsen the problem. If it hasn’t put me off you yet, it will hardly do so now. What do you think brought this on? I know I should never have set foot on your boat. That sojourn was entirely too pleasant and you were, as usual, entirely too willing. That is the greatest difficulty about you. You had better play the harpsichord with the skill that has made you the laughingstock of the Bohemian Grove. Or read me your latest column. Or talk to me about Ronald Reagan. We mustn’t get distracted, now; we really must talk about Reagan. How did this infuriating thing happen? I can’t stand it. It’s a miserable business.

 

How to square this with the men’s public image as rivals? It squares, one biographer notes. "In Burr you have a whole caricature of Buckley, but he keeps making passes at the narrator; someone who didn’t know would read it as just another swipe, but it’s almost hiding in plain sight for someone who does. In Vidal’s public works, even the anti-Buckley screeds, you can trace a consistent theme that Buckley was immediately interested in him. Part of it is a fantasy element to do with his own charisma, but another part I think reflects accurately the relationship they had.”

Why didn’t Vidal reveal it? “I think he thrived on Buckley’s obsession with him,” one source notes. “The idea that in spite of his professed disdain and loathing they were at each other’s sexual beck and call, that’s a powerful idea for someone as fixated on sex as an exchange of power as Vidal was. He wouldn’t have wanted to give that up. No one else gave him that kind of attention.”

For Buckley? “I think the reason he kept it close to the vest was more obvious, but I think he also got off on the fact that Vidal couldn’t say no to him. He professed to despise him, but he returned his letters. He returned his calls. He pretended indifference but he always had some excuse why he wouldn't just ignore him. I think Buckley viewed it as proof of his personal charm and of the hypocrisy of the left. It was gratifying that even this person who hated him in public was sexually obsessed with him.”

“There was never a letter where either of them admitted there was any feeling there, but you wouldn’t expect that from Gore, who famously said that beneath his icy exterior was more ice water. Buckley wishes him happy birthday in several letters but it’s framed as a taunt about aging and losing his mental acuity.  Vidal sends his condolences on the birth of a son. Buckley writes to gloat about Reagan’s election and Vidal writes back, May you burn in hell, and also, see you Friday? But in a strange way they’re very solicitous.”

Indeed, a letter from Buckley arrived in California at Vidal’s residence a few weeks after Howard Austen’s passing but its contents are not known. Vidal kept the envelope.

The correspondence continued late into both their lives. “I heard you have a picture of me over your bathtub, Gore,” Buckley wrote, “I’m flattered. Can you still [illegible]”  
“Occasionally,” Vidal wrote back, “with your conquered image, bending beneath the yoke, to inspire me. But not as often as I’d like.”

**"And the lobster thermidor was fantastic."**

A friend of the Buckleys in Manhattan described several occasion on which Buckley, several martinis in, had made pointed jokes about Myra Breckinridge "and we all looked at each other, because the joke was all about, oh, here's what Gore Vidal has on his nightstand, oh, Gore Vidal doesn't like to give head, and there wasn't a way to stop him and say, Bill, this clearly is not your intention, but this joke makes it sound like you've been to bed with Gore Vidal." 

"You've got it all wrong, Bill," Norman Mailer complained on one such occasion, inspiring laughter. "You're supposed to boast about your conquests, not the other way 'round.”

Tennessee Williams’ former lover recalled a weekend staying at La Rondinaia when he came upon Vidal holding the telephone in one hand while pleasuring himself with the other. “I crept to another receiver and whose unmistakable tones should I be greeted with but BILL BUCKLEY! I think I gasped, or something. ‘Is someone else on the line,’ Buckley drawls, and Vidal goes, ‘Never you mind,’ and Buckley says, ‘I oughtn’t have called anyhow,’ and Vidal says, ‘No, it’s refreshing to hear you beg, Bill.’ And it was sort of run of the mill sex talk, I wish you’d, you know, fuck me, I want to suck your, all of it, until the end. Bill came off very loudly. And then he says, very matter-of-fact, I saw the Best Man, I think it’s a nonsensical fantasy, typical of your mediocre prose style, goodbye, and hangs up.” I ran into Vidal afterwards and I said, is this a regular thing? And Vidal said, oh, yes, Bill calls me about once or twice a week whenever he’s three or four martinis deep and begs me to gag him with my cock,” and I couldn’t tell if he was in earnest. I don’t think it was that often but it did happen.”

Buckley’s acquaintances remember that he kept wanting to talk about Vidal in contexts where it wouldn’t necessarily be appropriate. “We were all on a sailboat and an editor for the National Review was joking about people he thought had small pricks, and the subject somehow got ‘round to Gore Vidal, and Buckley says, sort of off-handedly, I happen to know he hasn’t, and an intern who didn’t know about his propensity for bringing Gore up said, I beg your pardon, and Bill said, You know we had those debates together, and thank God the intern knew enough to shut up, because he was about to ask, how does that follow.”

Another intern remembered going skinny-dipping with Buckley and "he looked at me as I was toweling off and said in his memorable tone, 'Has anyone ever told you that you look like Gore Vidal?' I'll always remember it because it was a propos of nothing, but at the time I said, 'No, thankfully,' and he said, 'It wouldn't be an insult.'" 

"He said things like that," a secretary confirmed, "but we all thought, oh, that's Bill, that's his sense of humor. We never suspected anything else might be going on there because they so clearly despised each other. Except. No. I take that back. There was one incident that when I think of it again, I go, hmm. We were in a restaurant on Manhattan's Upper East Side, in the mid-seventies, and who should walk in but Gore Vidal and a couple of others. I said, Bill, look, it's -- and he looked over and waved in a sort of mocking way. And Vidal waved right back. And you could feel this sort of simmering tension in the whole section of the restaurant. And later Bill got up to go to the men's room. And he didn't come back for a while. And we looked over at the other table and I said, oh my God, Gore Vidal's not in his seat either. If they run into one another again, they might kill each other! And everyone laughed. We were joking, we said, well, if another five minutes passes or we hear any violent-sounding noises, we'll send Jim [Burnham] to have a look. And another five minutes pass. And before we had been joking, but Jim said, what if he's socked him in the goddam face. I'd better go. And he gets up and goes and comes back and says, Does anyone have a key? It's locked. And everyone says, what do you mean it's locked. And then Bill came back out. And George says, did you kill him? and he flashed us one of those smiles of his and said, The carnage was unthinkable. And we all laughed. Everyone but Jim, come to think of it. Vidal went back to his seat a few moments later and we all forgot about it. But now that I think about it. Oh my God."  

This mirrors the account of a friend of Vidal's in later years. He and Vidal read in the newspaper that a certain restaurant in New York had closed, and Vidal said, "Oh, what a pity. You know, Bill Buckley once got me off in that men's room with the whole staff of the National Review waiting at the table. And the lobster thermidor was fantastic." 

Christopher Hitchens recollected "something of a mutual obsession. Vidal liked to gossip about his various sexual conquests, or relate at length every time a Kennedy so much as coughed near him, which you see a bit of in Palimpsest, and he said, there's a whole chapter I'm not including, of course, and I said, Gore, I can't imagine your not including anything, and he said, no, if I publish it, Bill Buckley will sue again and the book will never be heard from, even though I don't think it's unflattering; I specifically say he's a better lay than Kerouac, if not quite on a level with Anais Nin. I could see he expected a rise out of me and I didn't give him one. Years later I saw Buckley before we were due to go on a show, and I said, do you know what Gore Vidal's been saying about you? He said, be more specific. I said, that you're a better lay than Kerouac, and he looked almost amused for a moment, Really? he said, He's never told me so directly. And I didn't give him a rise either. I expect they did sleep together. All I know is that's a correspondence you couldn't pay me to read." 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ...I read 'God and Man at Yale' for this. :-/


End file.
